About 30 Arrested at Anti-Pipeline Protest in Boone

By
Gavin Aronsen
-
Energy Transfer Partners

After a morning civil disobedience training in Pilot Mound Wednesday, about 30 people protesting Dakota Access LLC’s Bakken pipeline were arrested on trespassing charges near Boone’s Central Iowa Expo. They blocked the entrances to buildings storing construction vehicles for the multi-billion-dollar project that are owned by Precision Pipeline, a Dakota Access contractor on the project.

Among those arrested were Ames residents Julia Slocum, Jan Flora (both pictured below), and Taylor Brorby (shown at 1:30 in this video), a MFA student in Iowa State University’s creative writing program who recently published Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America, which he read from in June at Pilot Mound’s community center following a flotilla protest on the Des Moines River. (A temporarily restraining order sought by Dakota Access yesterday in an effort to prevent the protest was denied by a judge.)

The protest was attended by about 100 people and organized by Bold Iowa, an advocacy group led by former Des Moines lawmaker Ed Fallon, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, which last week said they were encouraging mass arrests at the event for just the first time in the organization’s 41-year history (the first time was in 2012, when 10 people were arrested outside Wells Fargo’s headquarters in downtown Des Moines as they protested the predatory lending practices the company engaged in that led to the financial crisis).

Meanwhile, protests against the pipeline continued today in North Dakota, where protesters attached themselves to equipment to halt the pipeline’s construction:

Ames community radio station KHOI was at today’s protest in Boone County and will cover the event Friday on its Local Talk program, which airs at 7 a.m., noon, and 7 p.m.

Gavin Aronsen
Gavin Aronsen
Gavin Aronsen is an editor and reporter for and founding member of the Iowa Informer. He previously worked as a city reporter for the Ames Tribune, research assistant to investigative journalist Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice, and in various roles at Mother Jones, where his work contributed to a National Magazine Award nomination for the magazine's digital media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Email: garonsen [at] iowainformer [dot] com.

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